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Monday, April 30, 2012

Yay for the Gen X guys - we cook! Although, personally, watching food TV is right up there with watching paint dry. On the other hand, Gen X folk don't seem to know as much about GMO foods - and we should - but our educated peers keep abreast of information about healthy food.

Gen
Xers are a lot more conscious about their food than their parents were —
especially the men, who are cooking and shopping more and watching food
TV as much as women.

For nearly 25 years, researchers from the University of Michigan have
followed the lifestyle habits of a group of 3,000 Generation X adults —
men and women born between the years 1961 and 1981. The latest report
[PDF] based on the ongoing study focused on Gen Xers and food, and
found that this generation is a lot more conscious about food —
especially the men — than their predecessors were.

The data collected as part of the Longitudinal Study of American
Youth found that Generation X adults spend more time shopping and
cooking food, watching cooking shows on TV and talking to their friends
about food or cooking.

“Generation X adults view life as a smorgasbord and have a little bit
of everything in terms of food,” says study author Jon Miller, the
director of the International Center for the Advancement of Scientific
Literacy in the Institute for Social Research at the University of
Michigan.

Gen X men are more involved in all aspects of meal preparation — from
grocery shopping to cooking — than their fathers were. These men spend
more time in the kitchen than their dads did, cooking about eight meals a
week and buying groceries more than one a week.

“Men have fun in the kitchen,” says Miller. “I was surprised by how
often they shop and cook. If men just happened to wander into the
kitchen and make something, that makes more sense, but when you buy into
the whole process, then you’re into it. Clearly they are into it.”

Gen X men also watch cooking shows and read magazine articles on
cooking just as much as women do. “Males overall get something different
out of watching cooking shows than women because I don’t think men have
as many cooking skills acquired young at their parents arm. My guess is
young men are still learning basic skills. They are still learning how
to boil water,” says Miller.

The shifting roles in the kitchen is also likely a sign of modern
household dynamics. In many Gen X couples, both partners have full-time
jobs outside the home and share household responsibilities. “In previous
generations, there was often a disparity, and the husband’s job brought
in more money or was more time consuming. That’s not the case anymore,”
says Miller. “Now there is much more parity between genders and in many
cases, the woman makes more. That means there is a reallocation of time
and duties for these people.”

Dr. John Ardizzone, the director of assessment services program at
the Family Institute at Northwestern University who is unaffiliated with
the study, says he also sees more professional men taking on domestic
duties than he did in the past. “The men in this age group definitely do
more work in the home, and more cooking for sure,” says Dr. Ardizzone.
“They also help out more with their kids than you would stereotypically
expect of men. They are putting their kids to bed and giving them baths.
They share in chores and responsibilities.”

Again, their motivation has a lot to do with the fact that their
partners and spouses are working full-time too, says Dr. Ardizzone, and
the household tasks need to be divided. “These women are well-educated,
are working more or also have more interests outside the house that take
up time,” says Dr. Ardizzone.

“It’s ‘have to’ and ‘want to,’” says Ellen Galinsky, the
president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute in New York.
The Institute released a national study
of the changing workforce in 2008. “These men can have to do more
cooking and want to at the same time. We find that women are changing
too. Younger women are just as ambitious as men. Men are becoming more
family involved and women are becoming more work and career involved.”

The Gen X report revealed a few surprises: for instance, only 9% of
the surveyed adults said they preferred to buy organic foods when
available. About half said they buy organic “some of the time,” but the
other half almost never purchase organic. ”There is this perception that
Generation X people are passionate organic buyers and it is not
necessarily true,” says Miller. “I think they also take into account
price, availability and other factors and don’t feel the need to always
buy organic. Those who are really devoted are a much smaller group than
we would’ve guessed.”

Here are some other key eating habit findings in the study:

On average, Generation Xers cook meals for guests about once a month
and talk to friends about food or cooking about six times a month.

Married women cook the most and prepare about 12 meals a week.
Single women cook about 10 meals a week and both married and single men
cook about eight meals weekly.

Generation Xers have a low level of genetically modified food
knowledge. “Generally speaking they know more about genes and biology
than their parents did, but genetically modified food is not something
they think about often,” says Miller. “Those who are scientifically
literate still monitor food news about food safety.”

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Jessica Bennett (senior writer and editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast) takes a look at the new film from Morgan Spurlock, Mansome, an examination of what it means to be a 21st-century man through an
unlikely lens—male grooming.

In an age of manscaping, metrosexuals, and
high-end grooming, what does it mean to be a man? Jessica Bennett on the
latest tale of confused male identity, Morgan Spurlock’s Mansome.

There
are probably a few ways to get people to watch a pseudo-documentary
about male grooming. One is to put Jason Bateman and Will Arnett in a
bathtub together, with fluffy white facial masks and cucumber eye
coolers.

“What do you think makes a man?” Arnett ponders, candlelight flickering in the background.

“Well,” Bateman says, “I wish I had your manly voice.”

Two men. One bathtub. A $200 facial scrub. Competing for who has the deepest voice. It’s perhaps the perfect example of the modern male contradiction.

And so begins Mansome, the latest film from Oscar-nominated director Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me),
which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, and will be
released in theaters on May 18. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed for
it. I did not make the cut.)Produced by Arnett and Bateman, the
film aims to tackle what it means to be a 21st-century man through an
unlikely lens—male grooming. That means everything from the philosophy
behind the mustache to mandatory manscaping to the rise of the man spa, where dudes can watch ESPN while getting their nails buffed (it’s a manicure, right?).

As Spurlock describes it, male primping has reached a tipping point, of sorts—and indeed, The Wall Street Journal proclaimed it in a story just this week: “Men’s grooming has gone mainstream.”
If you bother to compile the data, you’ll find that men spent $84
million on high-end skincare products last year; they make up an
estimated third of spa-goers; and 900,000 of them underwent cosmetic
surgery procedures last year, according to the American Society for
Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. (Brotox, anyone?) And in tough economic times, some men are willing to go to even greater lengths: in a Newsweek survey, 12 percent of men said they’d consider cosmetic surgery if it upped their chances of getting a job.

“There’s
been a real commodification of manliness in the last few years, and I
think, over time, there’s been a kind of softening of men,” says
Spurlock, who shaved his mustache during his film’s New York premiere.
“And I’m sure there are still men who chop down trees and hunt things,
but I think those people are few and far between.”

Shawn Daivari in scene from Mansome., Courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival

Spurlock,
it appears, has suddenly discovered the metrosexual—albeit a few years
late. Or perhaps it’s the more retro version: you know, guys who buy
designer hunting gear, and cologne that’s scented like the woods. So
while Spurlock insists he’s a “bar soap and water” kind of guy—save for
his $50 La Roche-Posay facial cream—he set out to learn the ins and outs
of male grooming habits across the country, with testosterone as his
guide.

The
male identity part gets lost along the way, but we do learn some
interesting facts. For one, did you know that the world-champion beard
grower is a dude from Walnut Creek, California? His red mane reaches to
his belly button, and he will threaten to kill anyone who touches it
(yes, really). Also: who would have known that male Mexican Molly fish
have actual mustaches? Apparently it makes them more attractive to the lady Molly fish—or so explains science.

“When
you wear a [mustache], you project a totally different energy and
purpose,” the cofounder of Movember (the month formerly known as
November) explains. “Deep down, every man wants to know what he looks
like with a mustache.”

It’s hard for Spurlock to go wrong when he’s got Arnett and Bateman in a tub. Add ZZ Top, Adam Carolla, and man-movie maven Judd Apatow to the Mansome
mix, and you’ve got the frat boy’s documentary dream. Zach
Galifianakis, seated in a forest, in a lumber-man’s jacket, tells us
that his father smelled like “garlic and diesel fuel.” Judd Apatow makes
sure we know that men “try to look good to meet a woman—or so that the
woman doesn’t run away.” Which is pretty much what Spurlock’s 5-year-old
son does, when he sees that his dad has shaved his beard. (Dad emerges
from bathroom clean-shaven. Kid breaks down into hysterics.)

But
Spurlock also introduces us to “regular” people, like the founder and
CEO of “Fresh Balls” —it is what it sounds like—who explains simply, “I
woke up one night, I had a problem, and I fixed it.” Or Mr. Carmine, a
Yonkers toupee-maker with a thick Italian accent and a (very) full head
of gray hair. We meet an extremely hairy pro wrestler who has his buddy
help him shave his back—because hairlessness comes with the job.

And
then there’s Ricky, a young New Yorker with what seems like a case of
body dysmorphia—and the most artificially sculpted eyebrows known to
man. He uses two separate razors to shave his face every day, so his
skin is baby smooth. He tans, moisturizes, exfoliates, and buffs, and
then gels his hair back, with a crisp white button-up. You can basically
smell his cologne through the screen. “When I look good, I feel
fearless,” the man tells the camera, taking one last look in the mirror
before he heads out for the night.

Spurlock doesn’t bother to provide much context for such grooming habits—you know, the economy, men’s place in the world, the rise of plastic surgery, and all those stories about how men are in “crisis.” Nor does he give a reason for the sudden vanity. (Men’s magazines? Queer Eye? Photoshop?) What’s clear is that as women rise up in the world,
they’re allowed to be selective—and let’s be honest, who wants a man
who doesn’t groom? “Women can now afford to be picky; and men probably
sense this,” says Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist.

But
what Spurlock will say is that men are facing what women have long
endured: mass marketing, and constant pressure. “We’ve started to do to
men what’s happened to women for years—which is to say, ‘you’re fat,’
‘you’re ugly,’ ‘you need to fix this and that,’” Spurlock says. “And now
suddenly all these guys who were incredibly confident just because we
were men are saying, ‘Maybe I’m not good enough.’”

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Author Daniel Mendelsohn, below left, and his father, Jay, went on a cruise that retraced the mythic journey of Odysseus. Shortly after they returned, Jay passed away. It's a touching story - and the context of the cruise is also fascinating.

Author Daniel Mendelsohn, left, and his father, Jay, on the Odysseus-inspired cruise.

April 15, 2012

A few years ago, author, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn was teaching the epic Greek poem The Odyssey when his father decided to take his class.

Jay
Mendelsohn, a retired research scientist, wanted to understand his son
better, and understand his life's work. When Daniel decided he wanted to
retrace one of the most epic journeys of Greek literature, Jay became
his travel partner.

Daniel, a professor at Bard College in New York, wrote about the trip for the April 2012 issue of Travel and Leisure Magazine. His father did not like the character of Odysseus in the first place, Daniel tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

"He
said, 'How can this guy be a hero? You know, he lies, he tricks people,
he cheats on his wife, he cries' — my father didn't like that at all,"
Daniel remembers – "How can you make this guy the center of a poem,'"
Daniel remembers.

But Jay did love Homer's first poem, The Iliad,
and he wanted to learn more about Homer and Ancient Greece. So, they
partnered up and began cruising the Mediterranean, starting in the
ancient city of Troy in modern Turkey – the city where Odysseus' journey
begins.

"One certainly gets a sense of the cultural power and authority of the Homeric poems, both The Iliad and The Odyssey,"
he says, "from the fact that already in antiquity, it was a tourist
destination to go to Troy." Even Alexander The Great visited the city as
a tourist, he says.

Of course, Daniel and
Jay didn't stop there. They visited places throughout Greece and the
Mediterranean associated with locations in Homer's The Odyssey. There's a lot of speculation, however, about whether these sites are truly the places mentioned in these epic poems.

"A
lot of these sites," Daniel says, "like Calypso's cave on Malta, one
definitely feels like they were sort of invented — or at least hyped."
Jay got a big kick out of each location anyway, Daniel says, even the
phoniest ones.

The two companions traveled
the ancient world on a cruise ship, which offered lectures by academics
and archeologists. It was a small cruise ship, with about 80 passengers
on board, but that didn't stop them from having unlikely encounters.

"The Odyssey
is, of course, about funny encounters and unexpected coincidences and
meetings that are too good to be true," Daniel says. "We got to talking
with a couple that we had seen a couple times, and it turns out he had
been the CEO of my dad's company," he says.

Some of the people they met even had an uncanny resemblance to characters from The Odyssey.

For example: There's one key moment in The Odyssey
when Odysseus returns to his palace in Ithaca — in disguise, to slay
all the suitors who had been courting his wife while he was away. Once
at the palace, however, he's recognized by a scar on his leg from a
childhood wound.

Coincidentally, Daniel was sunbathing on the deck when he noticed a Dutch man with a scar on his leg and an extraordinary story.

During
World War II, this man was a starving teenager. He was weak and
malnourished and ended up injuring himself while chopping firewood,
swinging the axe into his own leg. This wound almost cost him his life.

"A family friend, who was a classicist, helped him get through this illness in part by reading The Odyssey
to him," Mendelsohn says. "Even though he was not a classic student, he
recited to me, on the deck of this ship as an elderly man, lines from
The Odyssey in Greek," he says.

The man told Daniel he was on the cruise because he had vowed to see what Odysseus saw before he died.

All
in all, it was a good trip for both father and son — and an especially
poignant one. On April 6, 2012, Jay Mendelsohn passed away.

"I
can't travel with him anymore," Daniel says, "but in a lot of ways, he
will stay with me during the remaining trips that I am making and the
readings I am making of these texts," he says. "That just became a
different kind of odyssey."

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Man's best friend. . . . In country music and popular cliche, nothing comes between a man and his dog, not even (or especially) his woman. This 2010 NOVA episode, reposted at Documentary Heaven, looks at the long and complicated history between human and dogs.

Broadcast (2010) "Dogs Decoded" reveals the science behind the
remarkable bond between humans and their dogs and investigates new
discoveries in genetics that are illuminating the origin of dogs—with
surprising implications for the evolution of human culture. Other
research is proving what dog lovers have suspected all along: Dogs have
an uncanny ability to read and respond to human emotions. Humans, in
turn, respond to dogs with the same hormone responsible for bonding
mothers to their babies. How did this incredible relationship between
humans and dogs come to be? And how can dogs, so closely related to
fearsome wild wolves, behave so differently?

Dogs have been
domesticated for longer than any other animal on the planet, and humans
have developed a unique relationship with these furry friends. We treat
our pets like a part of the family, and feel that they can understand us
in a way other animals can't. Now, new research is revealing what dog
lovers have suspected all along: Dogs have an uncanny ability to read
and respond to human emotions. Humans, in turn, respond to dogs with the
same hormone responsible for bonding mothers to their babies. How did
this incredible relationship between humans and dogs come to be? And how
can dogs, so closely related to fearsome wild wolves, behave so
differently? It's all in the genes.

Dogs Decoded investigates new
discoveries in genetics that are illuminating the origin of dog - with
big implications for the evolution of human culture as well. In Siberia,
the mystery of dogs' domestication is being repeated--in foxes. A
fifty-year-old breeding program is creating an entirely new kind of
creature, a tame fox with some surprising similarities to Man's Best
Friend.

Monday, April 23, 2012

This article from Robert Augustus Masters was the February 12th, 2012, Integral Post at Integral Life. As usual, Masters offers a deeply intimate and spiritual perspective on monogamous relationship - one much needed in our society, and perhaps even more so in the integral community.

Robert Augustus Masters shares the introduction to his new book, Transformation Through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Awakened Monogamy, now available for preorder on Amazon.

Intimate relationship has over the last four or five decades evolved so far from its long-established ways—mutating in diverse directions—that its very nature and structuring, once a largely unquestioned given, is clearly up for some deep questioning and reformulating.

Reformulating, revisioning, restructuring, reinventing—how we tend to look at intimate relationship is changing almost as rapidly as intimate relationship itself.

One result of this is that many of us do not have a particularly clear view of intimate relationship and its possibilities. Nonetheless, we have to admit that something is different about intimate relationship now. We look back just two generations, and it seems as if we’re looking back many hundreds of years. Things are shifting that fast.

For a very long time, intimate relationship was viewed and lived, with few exceptions, as an alternative—and not necessarily an equivalent alternative!—to spiritual life. There was the householder, and there was the spiritual seeker, and there wasn’t much overlap between them. As wide as this split was for men, it was even wider for women. Intimate relationship was something you did—or endured—until there was cultural permission to do something “deeper.”

Now there not only is a significant amount of cultural permission—small by conventional standards yet substantial enough to register on societal radar screens—for something “deeper” to happen within intimate relationship, but also an increasing pull toward it. So intimate relationship has, at its leading edge, become less a prelude to spiritual opening and awakening, and more a catalyst or crucible for it.

This is nothing less than great news. Relational intimacy, especially in the form of monogamy, is then not something we have to get past or outgrow in order to spiritually evolve, but something that serves that evolution—and our journey toward wholeness—without any need to bypass or marginalize our humanity.

Grounding our spirituality in the raw material and inevitable difficulties of daily life—as are amply supplied by intimate relationship—is much needed, leaving us more present, more aware, more vitally whole. Spirituality directly lived in the context of ordinary life is spirituality that can have a great impact on the quality of life. Staying plugged into our spirituality during our relationship’s bumpier times provides us with an essential perspective, greatly increasing the odds that we won’t sweat over what’s not worth sweating over.

If we can access our spirituality—and access it at a deeper level than that of belief—during the inevitable trials and challenges of intimate relationship, we can probably access it just about anywhere.

Intimate relationship is perhaps the ashram of the 21st Century—a place especially ripe with transformational possibility, a combination crucible and sanctuary for the deepest sort of healing and awakening, through which the full integration of our physical, mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions is more than possible.

Intimate relationship as a crucible and sanctuary for our healing and awakening—sounds good, doesn’t it? But once our honeymoon with this is over, the real labor begins. The path is not neatly laid out for us, in part because we, through our very relatedness with our intimate other, are co-creating that path, that relational unfolding, as we go, feeling our way—more often than not in far-from-straight lines—toward what really matters. In this, we travel together not only through adventures spawned by our mutual conditioning, but also take up residence in deeper stages of intimate relatedness.

These are exciting—excitingly alive and excitingly unstable—times for intimate relationship. The playing field for men and women has, in far more ways than not, been leveled, making possible encounters and openings not generally available when women were second-class citizens or worse, cut off from their own voice and power. Now men and women have far more of an opportunity to meet eye to eye, belly to belly, heart to heart, without the disempowering ethics of earlier times. A meeting of true partners no longer has to be such a rarity.

However, a level playing field is not without its own perils, for it’s easy to reduce it to a flatland of force-fed equality. Once that women had more rights and a more inclusive cultural context in which to live, they began leaving men, in trickles at first, then in droves—which brought more and more men to psychotherapy or at least to their knees—and men then began to realize that they would have to do more than flash some bucks, be nice for a while, or raise a fist to keep women with them. Many relationships became arenas of negotiation, wherein equality between the partners did not liberate, but rather only fed the status quo.

In this extraordinary discussion, Robert Augustus Masters and Diane Bardwell Masters speak with Ken Wilber about the next evolution of intimate relationships: monogamy as a spiritual path, a crucible for awakening, and a vessel for enlightenment in the 21st century.

Neurotic egalitarianism seized the helm, declaring an across-the-board equality that not only increased comfort and apparent security, but simultaneously dulled and deadened. The husbands typically depicted on television sitcoms—sexless, inept, and often spectacularly unattractive—reflected and reinforced the notion that for men marriage was, whatever its trappings, a trap. And so on.

Intimate relationship shifted for many from barbaric to bland, infecting more than a few with nostalgia for the barbaric, because at least that had some juice, especially for the men. Affairs multiplied. Pornography infiltrated the mainstream, attracting refugees from the wastelands of conventional marriage.

It became essential that relationship move away from the banality and stagnation of such widespread conventionality, but it mostly went backward instead of forward, while often acting as if it were indeed moving forward (as exemplified by “open” marriage and multiple-partnering practices and their accompanying rationalizations). Monogamy started to take more and more heat, getting overly associated with the deadening of passion.

Nevertheless, amidst all this relational upheaval there was something else starting to emerge, something neither barbaric nor bland, something at once deeply passionate, caring, awakened, and rooted in integrity and love—a stage of intimate relationship that I call awakened monogamy (and have elsewhere referred to as mature monogamy). The territory between immature monogamy and awakened monogamy, an ever-shifting yet ever-fertile zone of potential relational evolution, features a remarkably rich mix of landscapes, emotional and otherwise, and can seem overwhelming in its complexity and overlapping concerns.

The general belief has been that boys don't talk about their feelings because they would be embarrassed or afraid of being seen as weak. According to this new study, however, they simply do not believe that talking about their feelings will make any difference.

A lot of my counseling clients do not think it will help to talk about their feelings, either, including a lot of women, but that does not make it so. It's good to know that "boys didn't express angst or distress about discussing problems any more than girls," so at least it's not a fear issue.

We can educate boys to know that sometimes it does help to talk about feelings. And I would suspect that part of their belief that it doesn't help comes from their socialization. We teach boys that feelings are useless, stuff for girls to talk about but not something real men even think about. That can change - it needs to change.

Boys are never likely to share as much emotionally as do girls, but that does not mean we cannot help them be more emotionally intelligent and, with that, more empathetic and compassionate.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 22, 2011) — A new University of Missouri study finds that boys feel that discussing problems is a waste of time.

"For years, popular psychologists have insisted that boys and men would like to talk about their problems but are held back by fears of embarrassment or appearing weak," said Amanda J. Rose, associate professor of psychological sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. "However, when we asked young people how talking about their problems would make them feel, boys didn't express angst or distress about discussing problems any more than girls. Instead, boys' responses suggest that they just don't see talking about problems to be a particularly useful activity."

Rose and her colleagues conducted four different studies that included surveys and observations of nearly 2,000 children and adolescents. The researchers found that girls had positive expectations for how talking about problems would make them feel, such as expecting to feel cared for, understood and less alone. On the other hand, boys did not endorse some negative expectations more than girls, such as expecting to feel embarrassed, worried about being teased, or bad about not taking care of the problems themselves. Instead, boys reported that talking about problems would make them feel "weird" and like they were "wasting time."

"An implication is that parents should encourage their children to adopt a middle ground when discussing problems. For boys, it would be helpful to explain that, at least for some problems, some of the time, talking about their problems is not a waste of time. Yet, parents also should realize that they may be 'barking up the wrong tree' if they think that making boys feel safer will make them confide. Instead, helping boys see some utility in talking about problems may be more effective," Rose said. "On the other hand, many girls are at risk for excessive problem talk, which is linked with depression and anxiety, so girls should know that talking about problems isn't the only way to cope."

Rose believes that the findings may play into future romantic relationships, as many relationships involve a "pursuit-withdraw cycle" in which one partner (usually the woman) pursues talking about problems while the other (usually the man) withdraws.

"Women may really push their partners to share pent-up worries and concerns because they hold expectations that talking makes people feel better. But their partners may just not be interested and expect that other coping mechanisms will make them feel better. Men may be more likely to think talking about problems will make the problems feel bigger, and engaging in different activities will take their minds off of the problem. Men may just not be coming from the same place as their partners," Rose said.

The paper, "How Girls and Boys Expect Disclosure About Problems Will Make Them Feel: Implications for Friendships," will be published in an upcoming edition of the journal Child Development. The study was funded by the National Institute for Mental Health and was co-authored by current and former MU psychology graduate students Rebecca Schwartz-Mette, Rhiannon Smith, Lance Swenson, Wendy Carlson, and Erika Waller and Rose's colleague Steven Asher.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

This looks like a great program - one that should be implemented in all schools. If we can help young men think about sex and sexuality differently than they might otherwise (which means different from the cultural messages), we can help them grow up to be good men.

More related to this story

In Blake Spence's class, no topic is off-limits, especially when a boy
has dropped it anonymously into the “question box.” Mr. Spence, 28,
co-ordinates the WiseGuyz Program, now on offer to Grade 9 boys in two
Calgary high schools. In 14 two-hour sessions offered once a week, the
guys talk – yes, talk, without girls in the room – about everything from
reproductive anatomy, sexually transmitted infections and birth control
to relationships, values and the media.

WiseGuyz, run by the Calgary Sexual Health Centre (which gave Mr. Spence
his training), isn't just sex ed with an update. It's part of a new
wave of initiatives to intervene in a young, male culture that is giving
many adults cause for concern.

Long-term, the aim is to combat the
rates of domestic violence and sexually transmitted infections.
Short-term, the goal is to tutor young men in healthy relations with
women and non-destructive masculinity.

A U.S. study of 1,430 Grade 7 students published last month found that
nearly one in six (15 per cent) reported being physically abused by
someone they had dated; one in three (37 per cent) said they had been
victimized psychologically or electronically in a romantic context.

“The script about what sexual relationships should be has been written
for young men – that they have to be the aggressors and that it's about
their pleasure, not necessarily their female partner's,” Mr. Spence
says.

He also points out that boys in Grade 9 today “consume a lot of
pornography.” Thus, “they need a lens to understand that those messages
can be harmful, and that they're actually not realistic. We're giving
them a context to consider.”

At a time when media and college-campus chatter seem to celebrate
binge-drunk sex, disposable partners and protracted adolescence as the
norm, critics such as Wendy Shalit and Laura Sessions Stepp have raised
the alarm about “girls gone wild,” while seeming to neglect the other
half of the equation.

But educators, at least, are increasingly shifting their focus to the masculinity script.

They say they need to start early: As young men construct their
sexuality, they are being presented with myriad misogynist offerings,
from the blatantly sexist attitudes of Tucker Max's “fratire” bestseller I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell or on TV in Two-and-a-Half Men,
to a “pickup artist” scene that has spewed out countless “seduction
manuals” and boot camps for guys eager to try out techniques such as
“negging,” which involves bulldozing a sexual prospect's self-esteem to
break down her resistance.

On campus, disturbing signs of what feminist critics call “rape culture”
have emerged, including a 2010 late-night march by a YaleUniversity fraternity that saw pledges walk around a female-freshman-housing area chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!”

Equally queasy messages can be found in advertising: Earlier this month,
a Facebook ad for vodka manufacturer Belvedere showed a man pinning
down a frightened woman in his lap. “Unlike some people, Belvedere
always goes down smoothly,” the tagline read.

Most of all, perhaps, hard-core porn is now also seeping into the way adolescent and teenage boys navigate sex.

“Two clicks away and you're watching people have sex, all kinds of ways
of women being degraded,” laments Pam Krause, executive director of the
Calgary Sexual Health Centre. “Is there a message in urinating on a
woman's face? If your parents aren't talking about sex with you, and you
aren't getting good sex ed at school, that might be your first and
perhaps only context for sex and sexuality for a while.”

A British survey published by Psychologies magazine in 2010 found that
81 per cent of 14-to-16-year-olds (regardless of gender) had looked at
porn online at home, while 63 per cent called it up on their phones; a
third of them had seen sexual images online when they were 10 or
younger. A 2006 study involving rural Alberta youth from 17 schools
found that 88 per cent of Grade 8 boys had viewed porn online, while 60
per cent had watched sex videos or DVDs.

“The availability of free Internet porn means not only that pornography
is instantly available to anyone of any age, it also means that porn has
permeated the culture to the point where its dominant messages about
women, men, sex and power have permeated areas that we don't think of as
porn: advertising, film and television,” says Michael Messner, a
sociology and gender studies professor at the University of Southern
California.

“A challenge facing any adults working with boys is just to get them to
think about and talk about these images, while not falling back on the
guilt-loaded, anti-sex strategies that have proven so unsuccessful in
the past.”

WiseGuyz was first piloted in 2010, and it will be adapted into a
non-mandatory curriculum available to schools this fall. (Students need
consent from their parents.) Teachers and administrative staff nudge
into it the boys they think would benefit most: “It might be guys
already in relationships, guys that get into trouble often, guys that
have potentially negative attitudes about women or about someone from
the LGBTQ community,” Mr. Spence says.

Whether it's boys-only sex ed such as WiseGuyz, hockey coaches slipping
in gender studies during practice or anti-sexism campaigns for college
guys, educators hope that young men will begin asking themselves: “What
is masculinity, and why do I act the way I do?”

It's a fine tightrope walk, to discuss these subjects without vilifying
men, emasculating or using the dreaded F-word – feminism. That's tricky,
given that the new programs for guys only “exist because of feminism,”
according to Prof. Messner, author of It's All for the Kids: Gender, Families, and Youth Sports.
He argues that although few young men today would self-identify as
feminists (and neither would many of their female peers), a lot of them
would agree with feminist positions on issues such as equal pay or
violence against women.

“The trick is for these guys to come to see these issues not just as
women's issues but as their issues, too,” he says. “Feminism as a
movement is stalled partly because of backlash against it, but also
because we have not yet taken the next step, which is to involve boys
and men in seeing how feminism promises to broaden their lives in
healthier directions.”

A CASE FOR SEX-SEGREGATED SPACE

Most of these new initiatives involve segregating the sexes, which is
something of a throwback, as co-ed is the gold standard in contemporary
sex education. But proponents suggest that it lets young men talk about
their shared experiences from a more specific, gendered perspective.

“Eventually you bring the two [sexes] together, but they need to build
self-understanding, self-confidence and comfort on their own,” says
University of Windsor sociology professor Eleanor Maticka-Tyndale, who
holds the Canada Research Chair in social justice and sexual health.

Programs catering exclusively to adolescent and teenage girls have
existed for years in Canada, including Girl Time for Grades 7 and 8 and
Starburst, which promotes “resiliency” in girls through Grade 7 to 9,
working to bolster their self-worth and help them build and navigate
personal boundaries.

In the male versions, “it's about looking at the male experience and
helping them to redefine that for themselves,” Ms. Krause says. About
sexist images in pop culture, for example, she says: “They don't have an
opportunity to explore what that means, or have values around it,
because we've never said to boys, ‘What do you actually think of that?'
That's what we want to do – start the conversation.”

In many ways, these programs are a junior version of the Men Of Strength
(MOST) Club: Now a decade old in the United States, the 22-week
curriculum for 11-to-18-year-olds emphasizes “healthy, non-violent
masculinity.” A college incarnation, Campus MOST, is now pushing
bystander intervention in sexual assaults.

“It does a good job of portraying the well-rounded, healthy, chivalrous
man, the real masculinity. It's not just your jock – the media portrayal
of what a man should be,” says Adam Middleton, a freshman at George
Washington University who attends Campus MOST.

Mr. Middleton, 19, started taking MOST sessions in Grade 10; he would go
at lunch on Fridays, and he recalls that they were “compelling
conversations.”

MOST is the brainchild of Men Can Stop Rape, a Washington, D.C.,
non-profit founded in 1997 that this year launched a highly publicized
call for college men to intervene against sexual harassment and rape.
Its “Where Do You Stand?” campaign stood out for its images of beefy
jocks taking on would-be date rapists. “When Kate seemed too drunk to
leave with Chris, I checked in with her,” read one such image, which 22
schools from Miami to Montana have already ordered on posters, bus
shelters, sweatshirts and wristbands.

The organization is also hosting workshops in which guys are called on
to discuss, as Men Can Stop Rape executive director Neil Irvin puts it,
how “dominant stories of masculinity impede men's emotional
intelligence.” They critique celebrations of binge drinking and putdowns
of “cock blocking” (getting in the way of another guy's attempts to
“score”) – “the frat-boy culture.”

While that kind of machismo might have been more acute in decades past,
“it's not a lot better either” today, Prof. Messner says. “We still
contend with sexist hyper-masculinity as a dominant force on campuses.”

Windsor's Prof. Maticka-Tyndale argues that such boorish behaviour goes
in and out of style: “We're on a bad swing right now … a more raunchy
swing of the cycle.” At least, she says, the jocks sneering from the
back rows of her gender-studies classes in the 1970s were replaced in
later decades by guys who “came in with an honest desire to address
issues of sexuality and gender,” and that remains true, at least inside
the classroom.

An anti-sexist men's movement arose in answer to second-wave feminism
and “has had a low-keyed life since the eighties, but is still around,”
says Gary Cross, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and author
of Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity.
But where that movement might once have been negative about
“conventional ideas of masculinity as strong and heroic,” as Prof.
Messner puts it, today's programs tout male strength as a resource that
guys can use to resist peer pressure and stand up for women.

Even some fraternities have taken an interest in rehabilitating their
images, as evidenced by the Walk a Mile in Her Shoes campaign, which
sees burly dudes donning stilettos to fundraise for rape-crisis centres
and domestic-violence shelters. Founder Frank Baird says that “tens of
thousands” of U.S. postsecondary male students have participated, with
roughly 40 per cent of the walks now being organized by frat houses, a
number that, to his surprise, has risen annually since the event was
launched in 2001. During the walk, guys shout anti-rape slogans and hand
out pamphlets on drinking and sexual consent, among other issues, while
teetering around in heels.

“It's a very dramatic way of showing, ‘I want to be a good guy,'” Mr.
Baird says. The frat members do the walks to fulfill the community-work
requirements in their charters, he says, but they are also occasionally
spurred by assaults on campus.

Might the appeal be more in the attention-seeking than the activism? Mr.
Baird acknowledges that for some it might be, but he points out that to
do the walk, the young men first need to connect with a rape-crisis
centre or a domestic-violence shelter: “That's when they start to get
educated. ... These guys are directly interacting with the mostly women
who are working there. Under what other conditions would they come
together?”

After all, he says, “men don't often get a chance – many of them feel
like they never get the chance – to say anything about gender. ... What
happens when men get beat over the head is they shut down. We need to do
this in a way that doesn't make men defensive.”

WANT BOYS TO TALK? ENLIST A JOCK

Reaching young men in a way that doesn't make them leery takes a
particular type of role model, but parental efforts have long come
across as too prying. In the case of intimacy and sexuality, many
parents are still simply too squeamish for the job.

“It depends on each family, but often parents are relieved not to have
the conversation with their kids,” WiseGuyz's Mr. Spence says.

One place many advocates are looking to find positive role models is in sports.

“In school, there's a lot of pressure to be sexually successful, have
lots of girlfriends and be a jock, an athlete, a man's man,” says
Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook University
and author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. “Which is why using athletes and coaches to bring men into the conversation is so valuable. They really have the credibility.”

The high-school athletics program Coaching Boys into Men, for example,
brings gender studies into team practices. Now used across 20 American
states as well as by junior hockey coaches in Alberta, the program
started out as a playbook for coaches who wanted to take advantage of
teachable moments when they overheard troubling talk in the locker room,
some of it about sexual assault. Now, it's free for anyone to download
online.

“In our pilot work, we found athletes saying that coaches are like a
second dad: ‘Whatever coach says, I listen to,'” says Elizabeth Miller,
chief of the division of adolescent medicine at Children's Hospital of
Pittsburgh who helped to develop the program.

A study published last month in the Journal of Adolescent Health found
that young men who went through the sessions were more likely to
intervene when they witnessed their peers disrespecting or abusing women
than other boys. By the end of a season, Dr. Miller has seen teen males
calling each other out in the presence of women: “When they caught each
other being disrespectful, they'd say, ‘Yo! Boys to men.' ”

While they're not coaches, the facilitators at WiseGuyz aren't exactly
stodgy either: “We're not teachers. We're young guys,” Mr. Spence says
of his three-man team. (A female instructor helps with some sessions.)

“The more we can connect with them, the more we're going to respect
them,” agrees Collin Anda, a 15-year-old student at Calgary's Georges P.
Vanier Junior High School, where WiseGuyz is currently halfway through
the 14-week course.

The curriculum includes sessions on sexual diversity, fatherhood,
emotional stress, sexual consent and conflict resolution, among many
others. The boys discuss cases such as that of Matthew Shepard, the
young Wyoming man murdered for being gay in 1998, and watch feminist
Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly, a film about gender stereotypes in advertising.

“It's a laid-back class, but it teaches you a lot,” Collin says, such as
“how to keep a manly life but also be responsible and respectful” and
“how she'll feel in certain situations, and how you can change that –
how you can make a relationship better at a young age.”

Does Collin think the exercises have the potential to groom him into a better boyfriend, when he has a girlfriend?

“Yes, actually, I do,” he says. “It makes you think about how you are.
It makes you look into the mirror. It just gets you thinking.”

In fact, Collin's mother, Thais Anda, says she has noticed a change
already. Before WiseGuyz, Ms. Anda would hear Collin chatting girls up
via Skype and “shake her head” at the things he would say.

“Now I notice that he talks differently,” says Ms. Anda, a 38-year-old
administrative manager at Dell Canada. “He doesn't talk in a way that's
demeaning. He doesn't try to make the girl like him by acting stupid. He
talks more maturely and wisely.”

Thursday, April 19, 2012

A little wisdom for the spiritual path . . . . Even steps that feel like going backward are taking us where we need to go. Sometimes we need to take the bigger perspective, to know that we are always already exactly where we need to be on our journeys.

Sometimes during our spiritual growth we can feel as if we are going backwards, rest assured you are not.

There are times when we feel that we are spinning our wheels in the mud in terms of our spiritual progress. This can be especially true following a period of major growth in which we feel as if we’ve gained a lot of ground. In fact, this is the way growth goes—periods of intense forward movement give way to periods of what seems like stagnation. In those moments when we feel discouraged, it’s helpful to remember that we don’t ever really go backward. It may be that we are at a standstill because there is a new obstacle in our paths, or a new layer to get through, but the hard work we have done cannot be undone.

Every step on the path is meaningful, and even one that seems to take us backward is a forward step in the sense that it is what we must do to move to the next level. In addition, an intense growth spurt requires that we rest for a time in order to fully integrate the new energies that have been liberated by our hard work. When we feel we are not making progress, we can encourage ourselves to take a moment to rest. We can meditate more, feed ourselves well, and get extra sleep. Before we know it, we will be spurred on to work toward the next level of our development, and this rest will make sense then as something we needed in order to continue.

Once the sun rises, it doesn’t go backward but instead follows its path in one direction. It may appear to stand still for a moment in time, or to move more slowly at some point or another, but really it is steadily moving forward on its path. We are the same way, and once we have moved through something we can never really go back. We may be resting or revisiting issues that seem old, and it’s natural to feel stuck, but in truth we are always taking the next important step forward on our path.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

From Blip.TV, a discussion presented by Adelaide Writers' Week, March 2012:

At Adelaide Writers' Week, two novelists explore the vexing questions of contemporary manhood. Malcolm Knox’s novel The Life is a knowing rift on the life of a retired surfer. Deborah Roberston’s Sweet Old World tells the story of a man who falls in love with a mother trying to save her child. Their books paint complex and thoughtful portraits of contemporary masculinity, and in this conversation they explore their ideas further.

I agree that mothers can teach their sons emotional intelligence - and that's important. But I see a lot of men who never fully individuate from their mothers - men whose wives feel they are the 2nd most important woman in his life. I'm sure Ms. Lombardi is not advocating an unhealthy relationship, but when women start telling men what healthy masculinity looks like, I get cautious.

First up, here is the segment from NPR's All Things Considered - then below that is the review I wrote of Michael Gurian's The Invisible Presence.

There are plenty of pop culture references to
the dangers of a close mother-son relationship. From the myth of Oedipus
to the movie Psycho, narrative after narrative harps on the idea that mothers can damage their sons, make them weak, awkward and dependent.

Lombardi's
own relationship with her son was a major inspiration for the book.
"For a long time, I thought that what we had was kind of unique," she
says, "that I was somehow blessed with this especially sensitive, caring
boy." But in her research for The Mama's Boy Myth, she discovered that she was far from alone.

Her
starting point was that mothers and sons face a stigmatization that
other parent-child relationships don't. Mothers and daughters, she says,
have no problems. "I'm very close to my daughter, and it doesn't raise
any eyebrows," she says. Similarly, father-son relationships are viewed
as very important, and even father-daughter relationships are valued.
"But mothers and sons — that relationship is always looked at with a
little skepticism and a little fear."

Lombardi
speculates that it might be Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex at the back
of many parents' minds. "I think some of this fear and anxiety around
the mother-son relationship really predates Freud," she says. "But that
said, Freud codified it. I was amazed how many moms in 2012 were still
bringing up the Oedipus complex."

A Healthy, Loving Relationship
The
stereotype of the unhealthy mother-son relationship is very familiar — a
controlling or dominating mother that interferes with her son's life
and refuses to let him come into adulthood on his own. But that's not
how it has to be to have closeness, Lombardi says.

"A
healthy, loving relationship is one where the mom is emotionally
supportive of her son. She recognizes his individuality, his
sensitivity, and his vulnerability along with his strengths," she says.
The
ideal mother-son relationship is one where the mother can and does
respond to her son's emotional needs — and perhaps it's not all that
different from a healthy mother-daughter relationship, she says.

It
often goes awry, though, when mothers of young boys are pressured to
let their child learn to cope on his own. One mother Lombardi
interviewed related a story where her pediatrician had accused her of
"modeling anxiety" while comforting her son after a fall. "We get the
strong message that the last thing a boy needs is his mother, when in
fact the research shows just the opposite," she says.

A Good Bond Leads To Better Relationships
The
research is actually quite extensive, as Lombardi tells it. Small boys
who lack a healthy attachment to their mother are often more aggressive,
disobedient and even violent. When boys reach middle school age, the
differences are apparent in their views on masculinity.

Author Kate Stone Lombardi is the recipient of six Clarion awards.

She has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

"Boys who were closer to their mothers ...
didn't think, for instance, that every time you got challenged you had
to fight," Lombardi said, "or that being a guy means acting tough or
going it alone." A better relationship a son has with his mother
translates to better mental health.

As those
boys reach manhood, the differences can be many, Lombardi says. For one,
they often have an easier time in adult relationships.

"One
of the things that moms tend to do with their boys is they teach them
emotional intelligence," Lombardi says. "They teach them to recognize
their feelings and talk about them."

Take the
classic image of a little boy melting down in a grocery store, and the
mother responding, "Use your words." Or when the sullen high schooler
comes home, slams the door and yells, "I don't want to talk about it!"
The mother with the healthier relationship, Lombardi says, can ask her
son to cool off and talk it out when he's ready.

Lombardi
knows it works — after all, her own son, now 23, now enjoys the
benefits of having that healthy relationship while growing up. And now
that his mother has shared it with the world?

"He's pretty proud of it," she says. "He's not ashamed of our closeness."

Now boys live at home until college, and often they return when
school is finished until they can find a job and their own apartment.
Mothers make this separation process even more difficult in trying to
maintain their early attachment to their child, which is the opposite of
what a young man needs. An adolescent boy is beginning the
individuation process, moving away from the mother and into the world of
men, and going to college should finalize this separation. Yet this is
not happening for a lot of young men.

So what happens to the son when the mother has been dismissing the
role of the father, or dismissing the roles of men in general — or
worse, disparaging the father with put-downs or insults? How is a boy
to find his place in the male world when his mother has negated what he
is destined to become, an adult man?

As Gurian demonstrates, that boy does not become an adult man — he
remains stuck in an in-between place where he needs the approval of
women and men to feel of value, in essence, because there has
not been any internalized male ideal (since men are bad, abusive, or
useless: “all men are pigs,” “men suck!” “all men want is sex,” or “men
have ruined the world”). While this does not happen in the majority of
young men’s lives, it does happen much more than we would like to
believe.

The other possibility for this individuation failure is an absent
father, either through abandonment, divorce, or death. My father died
of a heart attack when I was 13-years-old — and there was no good male
role models in my life. I was dismayed to see myself in one of
Gurian’s lists of characteristics of uninitiated men (p. 38-39). While I
have spent years working on this aspect of my life, it seems I still
carry some of the scars.

* * * * *

In the third chapter, Gurian looks at how this initiation failure and
the impingement relationship with the mother shapes a man’s adult
romantic relationships. By impingement (a reference to the work of D.W.
Winnicott, a pioneer in parent-child attachment theory) Gurian is
referring to the ways that parents fill their own emotional needs
through their children. This is a difficult thing to monitor in
ourselves — Dr. Dan Siegel spends a whole book on how we can
development this skill (Parenting from the Inside Out,
2003) — but we need to be aware of it because it puts the infant or
child in the impossible position of taking care of the parent.

For boys, growing up in this environment — which can continue into
adulthood, especially when the father is absent due to emotional
distancing, work, abandonment, or death, and shows up in comments such
as, “Don’t ever leave me,” or “Be my little man” — symbolically forces
him to be a surrogate “lover” or partner for his mother. And what
little boy does not want to please his mother?

But this sets up the young man to remain more loyal to his mother
than to his romantic partner when he begins that element of his life.
This was classically known as the mother complex, and although
it’s a near cliché, it’s also an accurate assessment of what can happen.
The girlfriend or wife ends up feeling she comes second to the mother,
and she is correct.

Other elements of this pattern can manifest as a need for approval
from the romantic partner. A boy-man who grew up with a “smothering”
mother (which is how I look at my own childhood with my mother) has no
sense of self outside of that external approval. This man is
“spineless” or “weak” or “hen-pecked” — all clichés that pathologize
something the man had no control over in his life. He did not choose to
be parented in that way.

In this respect, I would recommend this book for women as much as for
men. Understanding how the man you love was raised will help you
understand those aspects of his personality that you might find
challenging. (Gurian offers study questions for women at the end of the
book.)

Mad Men has captured the imaginations of millions of viewers, winning fifteen golden globes and four Emmys. In Mad Men on the Couch, Dr. Stephanie Newman analyzes the show’s primary characters through the lens of modern psychology.

For those who do not know what this means, it is widely considered (albeit wrongly) that personality disorders are incurable - so giving someone a personality disorder diagnosis (Axis II in the DSM-IV-TR) is labeling them as "crazy." Once this diagnosis is given, it will follow these women for life, impacting their employment options, their insurance costs, and many other areas of their lives, not least of which is their sense of self.

“I think they have actually discovered there is a difference between men and women. And the sexual abuse report says that there has been, since 2006, a 64% increase in violent sexual assaults. Now, what did they expect? These people are in close contact, the whole airing of this issue has never been done by Congress, it’s strictly been a question of pressure from the feminist.”

She then noted that the budget of the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office increased from $5 million in 2005 to more than $23 million in 2010.

“So, you have this whole bureaucracy upon bureaucracy being built up with all kinds of levels of people to support women in the military who are now being raped too much,” Trotta remarked.

Is this how we should make sense of the violence? Military women should expect to be raped because they are serving in close proximity to men? Men cannot control their beastly sexual urges when they are around women?

It must be noted, despite the belief that rape is about sex, that most rape is about anger, power, humiliation, or some other motivation (control, revenge, and so on) and is NOT about sex. Please keep that in my mind throughout this post.

Cultural and literary critic Camille Paglia thinks women need to get beyond the feminist idea that men and women are equal (from PBS - Rape: The most intimate of crimes).

In her book, Sex, Art and American Culture, Camille Paglia calls these "somber truths" women must accept. "Feminism keeps saying the sexes are the same," she writes. "It keeps telling women they can do anything, go anywhere, say anything, wear anything. No, they can't. Women will always be in sexual danger." She may be right, but that doesn't necessarily make rape a woman's responsibility.

Meanwhile, Gloria Steinem believes we need to stop worrying about who gets raped (aside from being focused on the 18-24 age range, there are few other patterns, and even older women are targets) and start looking at who does the raping:

"We have to stop talking about who gets raped and talk about who rapes. Somebody is doing these things. And we have to identify who they are." Who is that somebody? Why do men rape women? And how do you stop them?

When humans lived in a world of physical power, small tribal groups, tenuous survival, and little to no higher cognitive function (such as guilt or empathy), rape may have been a part of life. Or at least that is what the evolutionary psychologists argue, and they contend those same drives are still present in our psychological make-up as a species.

They may be partially correct - rape is more likely when social structures break down in famine, natural disasters, and warfare. To a certain degree, social structure helps reduce violence and enforces norms of behavior.

Further, while we tend to think of primates as more sexually violent, Frans de Waal and other primatologists present very different viewpoints. Barbara Smuts (Discover, Aug. 1995) observes:

Orangutans and chimpanzees are the only nonhuman primates whose males in the wild force females to copulate, while males of several other species, such as vervet monkeys and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), rarely if ever try to coerce females sexually. Between the two extremes lie many species, like hamadryas baboons, in which males do not force copulation but nonetheless use threats and intimidation to get sex.

Clearly, this behavior is not common to all primates, and bonobos offer the best example of a culture where male assault never has been recorded - interestingly, we are as closely related to bonobos as we are to chimpanzees.

A unique aspect of bonobo society is that they are a female-dominated species
thanks to the network of support that exists between bonobo females.
Chimpanzee females are largely isolated from one another, but bonobo
females come to one another’s aid. While there may be genetic differences that account for the lack of sexual coercion in bonobos, one important factor is the different environment that promotes these cooperative networks and limits the usefulness of male coercion (see my interview with Frans de Waal for more on this topic). Male bonobos mate more frequently by gaining support
from these female networks rather than using sexual coercion as can be
found in chimpanzees. Males grow up with this “culture” and observe the
older males in their troop emphasize grooming over aggression and then
adapt their own behavior in order to maximize their reproductive
success.

But even among baboons, where sexual violence is common, where the physically dominant male forces females into sexual relations, there is a clear pattern of learned behavior that can be unlearned in a single generation (as related by Robert Sapolsky in his essay “A Natural History of Peace” for the journal Foreign Affairs [pdf here] and cited in Scientific American, July 20, 2011):

Male baboons have been known to viciously maul a female that has rejected their advances and the level of male aggression is strongly correlated with their mating success. However, in a unique natural experiment
Stanford primatologist Robert Sapolsky observed what developed when the
largest and most aggressive males died out in a group known as Forest
Troop (because they were feeding at the contaminated dump site of a
Western safari lodge). In the intervening years Forest Group developed a
culture in which kindness was rewarded more than aggression and
adolescent males who migrated into the troop adopted this culture
themselves.

Clearly, there is a learned component to this form of behavior that is not inherent in baboon culture. So why are human males still prone to sexual violence - millennia after we have outgrown the conditions that may have supported such behavior - and why does male sexual violence seem worse in the military?

Why doesn't military structure offer some of the same protective structure against rape as civilian culture? Maybe there is something about the military culture that also produces or encourages this behavior? According to U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (CA), the system is completely broken.

The Department of Defense estimates that more than 19,000 service members were raped or sexually assaulted in 2010. Due to a military culture heavy on retaliation and light on prosecution, only 13.5 percent of the victims report the rape.

The system of justice designed to adjudicate cases of rape in the military is in complete shambles. Victims are blamed. Assailants are promoted. Unit commanders - whose promotions are dependent on the conduct and performance of the soldiers they supervise - have an incentive to see that allegations are few and convictions are fewer. As a result, the overwhelming majority of cases get swept under the rug.

This abomination is not new. The Pentagon has largely ignored the recommendations of 18 reports on sexual assault and rape in the military over the past 16 years. As a result, the problem is now worse than ever.

Rep. Speier says there have been many reports outlining the problems and suggesting changes, but the Pentagon has systematically ignored them.

It took four years and the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to finally establish a statutorily required commission to investigate reports of sexual misconduct in the military. His successor, Robert Gates, has yet to implement a statutorily required database that would centralize all reports of rapes and sexual assaults in the military.

It is time for the Pentagon to stop treating legal directives as mere suggestions. And it is time for Congress to abandon its role as a bystander.

One might begin to believe that military leaders have a "boys will be boys" mindset that allows them to write off the prevalence of rape and sexual assault as part of the culture. The way they handle the issue - or more accurately, don't handle it - reflects a kind of thinking that allows this behavior to continue.

In the 2010 Time article cited above, the fears of the victims of retaliation and absence of confidentiality prevent them from reporting the rapes and assaults 80-90% of the time.

The Pentagon estimates that 80% to 90% of sexual assaults go unreported, and it's no wonder. Anonymity is all but impossible; a Government Accountability Office report concluded that most victims stay silent because of "the belief that nothing would be done; fear of ostracism, harassment, or ridicule; and concern that peers would gossip." More than half feared they would be labeled troublemakers. A civilian who is raped can get confidential, or "privileged," advice from her doctors, lawyers, victim advocates; the only privilege in the military applies to chaplains. A civilian who knows her assailant has a much better chance of avoiding him than does a soldier at a remote base, where filing charges can be a career killer — not for the assailant but the victim. Women worry that they will be removed from their units for their own "protection" and talk about not wanting to undermine their missions or the cohesion of their units. And then some just do the math: only 8% of cases that are investigated end in prosecution, compared with 40% for civilians arrested for sex crimes. Astonishingly, about 80% of those convicted are honorably discharged nonetheless.

This is horrible - it is a system designed to protect the perpetrators and ostracize the victims. I have some suggestions for reform based not on patriarchal military standards but on civilian criminal law.

ANY victim of rape and assault, male or female (and there are many male victims as well), should hold the same rights to confidentiality with doctors and mental health providers as do civilians.

ANY allegations of rape or sexual assault should be fully investigated within 48-72 hours and disciplinary actions be taken as quickly as possible. This is much more possible in the military than in the civilian world.

ANY soldier or officer found to have committed a rape or sexual assault should be dishonorably discharged immediately and should serve appropriate jail time.

This is not what is happening, however. Rather, military leaders are waging an internal war on women who are, in their view, silly enough to get raped and report the crime. They are not seeking to punish the rapists, they are labeling the women crazy and discharging them from service.

This is shit - but CNN is reporting that this is exactly what is happening - and some of the women are coming forward with their stories.

Pentagon is assessing its training for sexual assault prevention and response

Editor's note: CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta will report further on allegations of sexual assault in the military Saturday and Sunday April 21 and 22 at 7:30 a.m. ET on "Sanjay Gupta MD" on CNN.

(CNN) -- Stephanie Schroeder joined the U.S. Marine Corps not long after 9/11. She was a 21-year-old with an associate's degree when she reported for boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina.

"I felt like it was the right thing to do," Schroeder recalls.

A year and a half later, the Marines diagnosed her with a personality disorder and deemed her psychologically unfit for the Corps.

Anna Moore enlisted in the Army after 9/11 and planned to make a career of it. Moore was a Patriot missile battery operator in Germany when she was diagnosed with a personality disorder and dismissed from the Army.

Jenny McClendon was serving as a sonar operator on a Navy destroyer when she received her personality disorder diagnosis.

These women joined different branches of the military but they share a common experience:

Each received the psychiatric diagnosis and military discharge after reporting a sexual assault.

"I'm not crazy," says Schroeder, who is married now, with two daughters. "I am actually relatively normal."

McClendon says she had a similar reaction.

"I remember thinking this is absurd; this is ridiculous. How could I be emotionally unstable? I'm very clear of mind, especially considering what had happened." McClendon says. "It was a ludicrous diagnosis."

A similar pattern

CNN has interviewed women in all branches of the armed forces, including the Coast Guard, who tell stories that follow a similar pattern -- a sexual assault, a command dismissive of the allegations and a psychiatric discharge.

Schroeder says a fellow Marine followed her to the bathroom in April 2002. She says he then punched her, ripped off her pants and raped her. When she reported what happened, a non-commissioned officer dismissed the allegation, saying, "'Don't come bitching to me because you had sex and changed your mind,'" Schroeder recalls.

Moore says she was alone in her barracks in October 2002 when a non-commissioned officer from another battery tried to rape her. When she filled out forms to report it, she says, her first sergeant, told her: "Forget about it. It never happened," and tore up the paperwork.

"It felt like a punch in the gut," Moore says. "I couldn't trust my chain of command to ever back me up."

McClendon says she was aboard a Navy destroyer at sea when a superior raped her on the midnight to 2 a.m. watch. After reporting the attack, she was diagnosed with a personality disorder and deemed unfit to serve.

"I was good enough to suit up and show up and serve, but I wasn't good enough after the fact," McClendon says.

Despite the Defense Department's "zero tolerance" policy, there were 3,191 military sexual assaults reported in 2011. Given that most sexual assaults are not reported, the Pentagon estimates the actual number was probably closer to 19,000.

"The number of sexual assaults in the military is unacceptable," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at a news conference in January. "Our men and women in uniform put their lives on the line every day to keep America safe. We have a moral duty to keep them safe from those who would attack their dignity and their honor."